Ninth Concordances

The Ninth Concordances are the ninth body of numbered instruments in the Concordances, and the most amended. The plural is deliberate and is insisted upon by the Office of the Clerk Registrar: the Ninth was issued in 681 as a single document of forty clauses and now circulates as four bound volumes, two of which contain no clause attributable to the original. Cataloguers who write "the Ninth Concordance" in a finding aid are corrected once, in writing, and thereafter ignored.

Its present extent derives from the Ninth Recension of the Concordances, which consolidated the original text with the drafting papers, Revision 1, Annex D, clause 404 and the Provisional Clarification. A fifth volume, the Concordance of Concordances, is shelved with the set and belongs to nobody.

Authority and the derived office

The Office of the Clerk Registrar holds its authority from the Third Concordance, the Sixth Concordance and the Ninth jointly, a triplicate arrangement intended to make the office impossible to abolish without abolishing three instruments at once. It has proved effective. It has also meant that any dispute over the Registrar's conduct must be pleaded across all three, which is why such disputes take, on average, nineteen months.

The Ninth is additionally the instrument from which the Panel of Concordance draws its standing to convene, and the one most often cited in the issuance of Provisional Verdicts. Clerks are trained to cite the Ninth last, as a courtesy to the reader, and first, as a courtesy to the Panel.

Temporary Permanencies

Clauses 112 to 118 of the Ninth, with the Tenth Concordance, establish the principle of Temporary Permanencies: that a departure from standing regulation, once made, remains in force until formally ended, however long that takes. Deviations are recorded in the Catalogue of Temporary Exceptions, a specialised auxiliary index that brackets and classifies each one so that none is mistaken for the rule itself.

The principle is usually illustrated by the case of Aperture Clerk Halen of the Ninth Spiral, posted to Aperture 9 under a temporary reassignment of four days in the winter of 704. The reassignment was never rescinded. Halen remained at Aperture 9 until retirement, and the post was thereafter treated as permanent, then budgeted as permanent, then described in the establishment rolls as "ancient." The Catalogue of Temporary Exceptions records the reassignment as Temporary Exception 9-4471, still open, with the annotation "review pending."

"That a thing is temporary is a statement about its origin, not its duration."

— Ninth Concordance, clause 114

The sphygmomanometer rule

Among the diagnostic instruments the Ninth sanctions are the Geometric Stethoscopes, Class-II, used for the indirect auscultation of foundational spatial axioms. The Ninth Recension reaffirmed the older rule that no petition may proceed while a Sphygmomanometer of Intent is in circuit. The rule is procedural rather than substantive; the Sphygmomanometer measures the intention behind a petition, and the drafters considered it unjust to weigh an intention while it was being weighed.

In practice the rule halts a hearing whenever the instrument is in the room, which it must be, since the Ninth elsewhere requires it. Clerks resolve this by declaring the instrument "in circuit" only while its cuff is fastened, and leaving the cuff on the desk. The practice is not written down and would not survive scrutiny.

Contradiction and schism

The Ninth's relationship to its neighbours is not settled. The Twelfth Concordance states that it assumes all regulatory functions of the Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Concordances, a claim the Ninth has never acknowledged. The Office of the Clerk Registrar reads the Twelfth as prospective only; the Panel of Concordance has declined to say.

The Ninth is also, with the Seventh Concordance, one of the two instruments blamed for the Gamma-Delta Intersection Event of '73, the seven-month period of conflicting aperture maps. The Seventh and Ninth assigned overlapping designations to the same junction, and neither would yield. The maps were reconciled by the Ninth Stairwell Annex agreement, signed in the Ninth Stairwell and filed, through an error nobody has corrected, in the Annex itself.

The term "Contradictory Concordances" first appears in a rubricator's marginal note to the Ninth, in a hand dated to 686. The note reads, in full: "These contradict." No clause number is given and no further explanation follows. The phrase entered general use within a decade and is now the standard term for the class of instruments the Ninth exemplifies.

Commemoration and holding

The Ninth is commemorated annually in the Year of the Ninth Librarian, though the Librarian in question is not named in the Ninth and the connection is traditional. A full set of the four volumes, the fifth, and the shelf they stand on is held at Floor 722 and may be consulted by written application. The shelf may not be moved. Annex Gamma-7 holds the working copies.